We need a Brad Pitt/Michael Jackson/Justin Bieber

[Justincredible]

Let's be honest.. "pretty privilege" or "handsome privilege" is a thing... And when you couple that with celebrity, power, money, influence.. that's when the tides begin to shift.

Part of our problem is that we have no good "face" of the movement.. we have the exact opposite of that. We have the scary looking "creep" on the news who was arrested for cp or statutory.

Imagine we had a spokesperson like Justin Bieber!?

Imagine one day Beiber makes a heartfelt video about how he's had this attraction all his life, and he admits that he's sexually attracted to 13/14 yr old girls.

And he wants people to understand that he's not a monster.. and he can't change the way he feels no more than a gay or straight person.

And he's coming out because he wants there to be more acceptance, more mental health care. And feels it would help keep kids safer.

That would be the catalyst that takes our movement leaps and bounds from where it is now. It would rescue our perception from the seedy underworld of grapists, predators and evil dangerous monsters. And catapult us into the mainstream.

Michael Jackson would have also been a good spokesperson for us.. and in some ways, he actually was. But without coming straight out and saying "I'm a minor attracted person"

I mean the guy had an interview talking about how he loved and adored little boys so much that he would make them milk and cookies and snuggle with them in bed. He built an entire theme park in his backyard, just to have kids come over and spend time with him.

That's textbook map behavior.

And people still loved and trusted Michael! As they should!

The world adores celebrities. They are able to forgive and understand celebrities for all their mistakes and flaws. Of course there are those that would hate them.. but someone with Michael's reach and influence would be enough to transcend the haters.

What do you think? Who do you think would be the perfect face for the movement?

I think it would have to be someone young, talented, good looking.. heck.. even a woman!!

Imagine like Billie Eilish comes out to the world.. and says "I want to draw attention to a cause that I'm deeply passionate about.." .. it would be an absolute game changer.

I think the "utopia" is a far off, unrealistic goal right now.. even as fun as it is to fantasize about.

But getting to a place where the average joe can simply admit it to his friends, family and co-workers.. and it's understood that we are just normal everyday people. I think that is a much more realistic place we could get to in our lifetime.

But it would take some real powerful celebrities to come out and be the face of the movement.

[Fragment]

It's hard because so many of us have mental health issues that make it hard to take on those "successful" roles.

It is definitely something we can do for the community, though. Reach dominant positions in society. Use those positions, maybe not to come out, but to shift the discourse.

Unfortunately once you get successful you have more to lose, so many people that have reached those positions no longer find themselves able to fight for MAP issues.

Dilemma indeed.

[Meiwaku_Mailing_Girl]

We're not going to have any famous people coming out in support or as a MAP themselves anytime soon.

[Harlan]

Famous people are hostages of their "reputation", they will not stand up for ghost people who are considered rapists. They will start saying something when the community has already become sufficiently broad and visible, when some weak dialogue becomes possible and the community has its own culture and its own representatives. How many celebrities do you know who supported the Stonewall Riots or then publicly and openly declared their support ?

AI response:

Why Didn’t Stars Immediately Support LGBT Rights?
In the late 1960s and early 1970s, openly backing gay rights could ruin a career. Many celebrities (even those who were part of the LGBT community) hid their sexuality or supported the movement cautiously. It wasn’t until the late 1970s and 1980s, with the rise of groups like "ACT UP", that celebrity support for LGBT rights became more widespread.

Right now, the only useful thing celebrities could do is support youth autonomy and be more sex-positive, promoting sex education and sharing their own positive or neutral experiences as teenagers ... Although this is not easy either.

I know this is a bad example, Kanye West is a total idiot, but he admitted to blowing his brother. Surely more adequate celebrities also had similar stories that they keep quiet about.

[PorcelainLark]

What do you think? Who do you think would be the perfect face for the movement?

I think it would have to be someone young, talented, good looking.. heck.. even a woman!!

I think an attractive, cisgender woman from a working class background, though preferably educated. My reasoning is as follows:

1. Attractiveness means there's nothing to latch on to for a cheap insult, and being desirable would mean people would want to agree with her. I don't want to be cruel, but if you take the superficial immediate first impression of Todd Nickerson, just based on his appearance people are likely not going to react as positively as they could. Balding, shifty eyes, skin blemishes, periorbital dark circles, pale skin, scruffy beard, overweight, and no eyebrows. When I first saw an image of him, I'm sorry to say that I thought it was a joke.
2. I don't mean to be transphobic, but the reality is that a transgender woman is going to be fighting a battle on at least two fronts. Unfortunately, people already have difficulty empathizing with trans people, so it may be a problem.
3. We've seen how many people have labelled MAP acceptance a conspiracy of the elites. At best it comes across as out of touch, at worst it comes across as a sinister sign of moral depravity.
4. However, on the other hand, too lower class would alienate the middle classes, so that a lower class person supporting MAP acceptance comes across as antisocial, or ignorant. It might be taken as a sign of insensitivity, of callousness, rather that a conscious and progressive choice. Therefore, they need to be attuned to how the middle to upper classes think, to dispel that impression of just being a brute. Education seems to be the best way to achieve that.

Basically we need someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

[Harlan]

Basically we need someone like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Meybe. I think we need a female version of Michel Foucault

3. We've seen how many people have labelled MAP acceptance a conspiracy of the elites. At best it comes across as out of touch, at worst it comes across as a sinister sign of moral depravity.

Bigots always fantasize - Homintern, PizzaGate etc.

During the Cold War, anti-queer commentators in the United States sought to link homosexuality and Communism, using the terms "homintern" and "homosexual mafia" as shorthand for a purported homosexual conspiracy in the arts

Or the ridiculous sentence of Tom O'Carroll - "Conspiracy Against Public Morality", which in its absurdity is comparable to Galileo’s sentence.

The Holy Congregation declares you, Galileo, vehemently suspected of heresy—namely, of holding and believing a doctrine false and contrary to Sacred Scripture: that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move east to west, while the Earth moves and is not the center of the world. Therefore, you incur all the censures of the Church…

[PorcelainLark]

Meybe. I think we need a female version of Michel Foucault

Judith Butler? I don't see the point in Foucault. "What if everything was a social construct?" It feels like a serious case of the emperor's new clothes.

Bigots always fantasize - Homintern, PizzaGate etc.

I think we ignore the tendency of populist anti-elitism at our own peril. I think if you compare the public perspective of Hilary Clinton versus Pope Francis it illustrates a significant difference. Both were targets of conspiracy theories, however Pope Francis came across as more sympathetic to the general public than Clinton. Personally, I'd be happy if it didn't matter how much you are perceived "insider" or not, but I'm not representative of the average person.

Or the ridiculous sentence of Tom O'Carroll - "Conspiracy Against Public Morality", which in its absurdity is comparable to Galileo’s sentence.

The Holy Congregation declares you, Galileo, vehemently suspected of heresy—namely, of holding and believing a doctrine false and contrary to Sacred Scripture: that the Sun is the center of the world and does not move east to west, while the Earth moves and is not the center of the world. Therefore, you incur all the censures of the Church…

The issue is that Galileo was drawing attention to an objective, empirical fact. Regardless of whether Galileo was accepted, he was right. Anyone that saw and understood the evidence would have to agree with his conclusions. With MAPs, we are mostly dealing with a normative question, about how things should be rather than how things are. Now, there are things like Rind et al. where the situation is analogous to Galileo (i.e. claims about the correlation of AMSC with psychological trauma), but over all the question is how should society be?

Antis are quick to point out that just because AMSC could be harmless it doesn't follow that it's moral. The options that remain mean either embracing moral nihilism (in which case, why bother trying to persuade people to accept MAPs?), or opposing non-cognitivism (i.e. working from the premise that there is objective morality, so that we can say how MAPs are treated is objectively wrong).

Rather than Galileo, I think a better model is Socrates.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_of_Socrates

[Fragment]

Nooooooo.... "Morality isn't real" and "morality is objective" aren't the only two options. I guess you'll need to read my book about it in 2035, though.

[PorcelainLark]

Nooooooo.... "Morality isn't real" and "morality is objective" aren't the only two options. I guess you'll need to read my book about it in 2035, though.

What kind of thing do you have in mind? Pragmatism or constructivism? I don't see how you can challenge majority opinion without appealing to objective morality, or rejecting morality altogether.

Pragmatism - it doesn't matter if being a pedophile is innate and the idea of whether there is an objective correlation between AMSC and trauma doesn't matter because there's no such thing as objective reality; it doesn't matter how we treat MAPs if accommodating them is too much trouble for the rest of society.

Constructivism - morality is just the will of the people, if a minority challenges it in a way that disrupts or inconveniences the majority then the majority is entitled to suppress and persecute the minority.

On the basis of objective morality we can say an outcast is mistreated, and that the majority can be wrong. My ideal is someone like Atticus Finch from To Kill a Mockingbird, but in the realm of morality rather than the law.

There is a fifth option, religious morality, e.g. Jesus being among outcasts and the ideas of agape and caritas. I'm sympathetic to it, but it isn't really something you can logically argue a person into agreeing with.

[Fragment]

Yeah, I don’t think we need to pick between "morality is objective" and "morality isn't real." You're right that pragmatism and constructivism can both justify a bunch of shit if taken too simplistically, but there’s a whole tradition of moral thinking that doesn’t rely on objectivity in a mystical sense, but still lets us challenge the majority.

Think of Hume, Iris Murdoch, Rorty, and David Wong. They all said that morality isn’t objective in the strict sense, but still grounded in a common human nature, emotional capacity, and social relationships. So it’s not just "anything goes subjectivity", or "common sense morality" mob rule. There’s a kind of naturalism there that still lets you say "this is wrong" without pretending there's a cosmic scoreboard.

So I think someone like Atticus Finch works just fine there. You don't need metaphysical realism, you just need enough coherence between your values and how humans actually live and feel. It's not as sturdy as divine command or objective truth, but it still pushes back against cruelty and incoherence. But if your objective law can't be proven or enforced it's not gonna get you far anyway.

Plato and Kant were dicks. And Bentham and Mill overreached. Naturalistic pluralism gives us all we need without conjuring up voodoo.